The two-day Climate Propagandas Congregation was marked by urgency. Organized by Basis Voor Actuele Kunst (BAK) and artist Jonas Staal, it was the final event before BAK’s defunding by the Utrecht municipality and Dutch Council for Culture, reflecting a trend of arts institutions buckling under economic and political pressures, all while western governments openly flout international law and climate change wreaks planetary havoc. Welcoming a packed audience, BAK director Maria Hlavajova described her reaction when she learned of the institution’s fate: “The question spinning in my head, ‘How can we be more?,’ filled me with a sense of possibility, against all odds.” That unshakable hope mirrored the will of artists, activists, cultural workers, theorists, and organizers who gathered in an aqua-carpeted “immersive diorama” to imagine ways of propagating radically egalitarian futures in an increasingly asymmetric present. Designed by Staal to invoke the Neoproterozoic Era’s Ediacaran period, described by geologist Mark McMenamin as a “pre-socialist socialist ecology,” giant painted biota adorned wood-frame podiums and stands around the auditorium, with larger specimens bearing the heads of historical revolutionaries like Ho Chi Minh, Eleanor Marx, and Thomas Sankara, to visualize the deep time of collective struggle. As noted in Staal’s 2022 video essay …